An inventor from Solihull who made more than £300,000 from selling cocaine has been ordered to pay the public purse £50,000.

Former chip shop owner Andreas Constantinou, of Abbots Close, Knowle, Solihull, is serving a five-year sentence after he admitted conspiring to supply cocaine.

The 42-year-old, who had been in negotiations with Microsoft over a device he invented to protect DVDs, ordered the drugs to celebrate his 40th birthday, Warwick Crown Court previously heard.

He was said to have a “Jekyll and Hyde” personality who was a married religious man with the “dark shadow” of heavy drug use.

Now Judge Richard Griffith-Jones has ordered that he must repay his assets of £50,000 within 90 days, or spend a further 15 months in prison.

His barrister Alan Landsbury said some of the money was coming from his family, including his mother who lives outside this country.

Constantinou was ordered to repay the money at a Proceeds of Crime hearing along with two other drug dealers, namely Paul Allton, aged 27, of Tower Hill, Bidford-on-Avon, and Norman Fox, aged 37, of Beech Drive, Kenilworth.

The three men were all jailed in March last year.

Eugene Hickey, prosecuting at a Proceeds of Crimes hearing at Warwick Crown Court, said it had been agreed that Allton’s benefit from his role was £24,241; Fox’s benefit was £52,401 and Constantinou’s benefit was £331,149.

The court heard that Fox has a van valued at £1,200, which he must sell and pay back the money within 90 days or face another 40 days in prison.

And Allton was said to have no assets, so was ordered to pay a nominal £1.

Not before the court was Ian Herdman, 37, of Alcester Road, Stratford-upon-Avon, who is serving a nine-year-sentence for conspiring to supply cocaine and cannabis.

When the men were sentenced it was said Herdman was at the centre of the conspiracies and ran his drugs network from his family’s pub, the College Arms in Lower Quinton, Stratford-upon-Avon, which he had bought with his parents.

The court was told it was all destined for Herdman whose ability to source drugs at such a high purity showed a close proximity to the importers.